At night, alone, I pulled myself clear of the mediocrities of the world that sought to claim me. I freed my hair of its restricting pins and it shivered like a thistle bush. I stole Nan’s bloomers from the drawer and escaped to the garden, their lovely silkiness all about my legs, my bare feet stung alive by stones and nettles. I crowned myself with ivy-buds and stared at the moon. I fled to a dark world that came alive only at night, nurtured by the very inattention of those others (wireless sets and electricity for them) who bound the day. I became Daphne and froze into the berry bush, Narcissus and gazed in the well. I clung to the iron of the fence and surveyed the desolation of a lane where old Mr. Stone from next but one roamed mad, where strange boys smoked tobacco in the barrel-yard, where someone shed the sanitary pad that lay bloodied and wilting further down.

My dog was my familiar in the garden; a book my companion indoors.

I approached happiness.

Yet my mother sighed at my appearance — urged me to comb my hair. My grandmother scolded for rude silence before Mrs. Dingle with gerberas and a swollen leg. And sighed too, more often than my mother; asked why I wasn’t like the rest.

Mention of those fabled others became more frequent. I was urged to emulate, not Annabel from Wilderness (after all, my mother is a realist), but the more suitably plebian girl on the cover of the Schoolgirl’s Own Annual my grandmother gave me for Christmas. I mused on her golden good looks (surely her name is Faith? — surely she wears fawn gloves?) unaware that my mother, who has forgotten how to dream, and my grandmother, who forgot so long ago she never knew, have a plan for me: